David Black

"This week we saw the release of Chris Anderson's book Free and reviews from the New Yorker (Malcolm Gladwell) and the Financial Times. I'd like to talk a bit about the firestorm that freeconomics (fed by Chris' book) has unleashed but first we need to clarify something."

"The whole reason the web revolutionized the world was that it rendered geography irrelevant. People connected worldwide based not on location but on their common interests… Now mobile phones are inverting everything again, in the other direction – because your location becomes most important thing about you."

"Almost four out of five European media planners expect to increase their online spending this year, but the internet will attract less than a quarter of all ad spend, according to figures from 14 countries compiled by Neo@Ogvily/Planetactive and SKOPOS (via WARC.com)."

US: "Right now we’re pegging local online advertising at $14.03 billion, up from our estimate of $13.3 billion issued back in January. As I said, this full-year estimate is likely to inch even higher when we get our midyear data."

"Now, quick, find the first 20 tweets or FriendFeed items about the Chinese Earthquake. It’s impossible. I’m an advanced searcher and I can’t find them, even using the cool Twitter Search engine."

"And lo another 4iP investment to unveil. Newspaper Club is a tool to help people make their own newspapers using online content. The brainchild of Russell Davies, Ben Terrett and Tom Taylor, it allows users tag online content, collect and curate the stuff they want and turn it into a really good-looking printed product. "

"OK, newspapers shouldn't turn off RSS feeds like I said here. And here. And here. I was wrong. I feel better now…"

"ITV 'needs some kind of payment system' on the web, says its strategy director. It will also need users prepared to pay…"

"we would like you to help us explore and weigh this debate using the interactive map below. " [via buzzmachine]

"Trinity Mirror is preparing a new standalone football site, MirrorFootball.co.uk, which will go live when the new season kicks off in August"

"I decided to analyze some of the 2008 data for my former community during the period of active management and the period of passive management."

"The computer code behind EveryBlock was released this week, and it was — for programming journalists, at least — a much-anticipated event."

US: "The research firm now expects the market to grow by 11 percent, up from its initial projection of 8 percent in January."

"If I was starting The Village Voice today, I would not print anything… I would build a website and a mobile app (or two or three). I would hire a Publisher and a few salespeople. I would hire an editor and a few journalists. And then I'd go out and find every blog, twitter, facebook, flickr, youtube, and other social media feed out there that is related to downtown NYC and I would pull it all into an aggregation system where my editor and journalists could cull through the posts coming in, curate them, and then publish them"

"For consumers exposed to brand display ad campaigns, the research found that: One in five conduct related searches and one in three visit the brands’ sites, Users spent over 50% more time than the average visitor to these sites and consumed more pages, Users spent about 10% more money online overall, and significantly more on product categories related to the advertised brands, Higher income audiences visited the advertisers sites"

"Here are some did-you-knows to drop about Twitter: the average user has 126 followers; only 20% of its traffic comes through the Twitter website; the other 80% (logically) comes from third-party programs on smartphones or computers."

"Evan Weaver, Lead Engineer in the Services Team at Twitter, who’s primarily job is optimization and scalability, talked about Twitter’s architecture and especially the optimizations performed over the last year to improve the web site during QCon London 2009."

"Behold the power of Yahoo: A link at the top of the site’s front page helped send more than 9 million page views to The New York Times in the span of two hours last week, breaking records for web traffic at the newspaper… But as we’ve seen with other news sites, the huge spike didn’t produce much advertising revenue… the Times could only serve cheap, remnant ads to its unanticipated visitors."

"In the heady days of early 2000, the megamerger of AOL and Time Warner heralded the web-based future of publishing. It would create a digital platform for Time Inc., the biggest, most-prestigious magazine group in the world. Needless to say, that didn't pan out, and here's where it gets ironic. Just as Time Warner is unwinding that mistake, AOL is figuring out the future of magazine publishing on the web. And it's doing so without Time Warner's content assets."

"Don't try to chew more than you can swallow. Start operations in smaller geographic footprints or niches"

"here’s what must happen to finally create a viable DIY local news ecosystem…"

"This past weekend, Google News announced a new feature to enhance its search engine capabilities. The new feature allows online readers to search for articles and headlines specific to the author that they are interested in by simply clicking on the hyper-linked text of the journalist's name. "

"Mirror Group Digital traffic has grown 80% year-on-year and in May the site had another record month. The Trinity Mirror website attracted 8,693,581 unique users last month, a rise of 1% on April. It had the highest percentage of UK users, 51.62% or 4,487,510 unique users."

"By reading these blogs, you can keep an ear to the ground on the latest developments that matter the most to journalism students."

"Today we are inviting any professional news outlet that is already included as one of the 25,000+ sources in Google News to become an official partner on YouTube and more easily share your news videos on both YouTube and Google News."

"I went to Activate 09 today… Here’s a taste of what I saw:"

"On Wednesday I spent a brilliant day at Kings Place at The Guardian's Activate 09 event."

"Today's a big day for us at EveryBlock. We're making our source code available. Over the past two years, EveryBlock has been funded by a grant from the Knight Foundation. The purpose of the grant was twofold: to launch this experiment in "microlocal" news, and to release the source code. Today, as our grant period comes to an end, we're fulfilling that second purpose."

"The table below shows that only 3 of the 9 national newspapers have an RSS feed with more than 10,000 subscribers in Google Reader."

“In the digital realm you can try to keep Free at bay,” Chris Anderson writes, “but eventually the force of economic gravity will win.”

"Tuesday's blog explosion about the arguments for and against free web content were caused in part by Malcom Gladwell's (author of 'Outliers' and 'Blink') review of a new book on the subject of free content by WIRED magazine's Chris Anderson in The New Yorker."

"Two years after introducing a feature that allowed people quoted in news articles to comment on those stories in Google (NSDQ: GOOG) News, Google has dropped the option."

"The idea is that any group of people with a shared interest can use rights-cleared content from the web and print it in a basic full colour newspaper format. 4iP’s Daniel Heaf says the ideal audience could be a group of birdwatchers, the residents of an estate campaigning for improvements, or a printed product rounding up the best of the internet."

"The NYT is taking its citizen journalism project seriously. 'The Local', its online section dedicated to all things community based, is delegating reporting roles to eager citizens, asking them to cover local body meetings. The 'missions' are posted on the website, alongside instructions and relevant information."

"Northcliffe Media has launched Local People, an ad-funded local community publishing platform that mixes area-specific business directories and social networking elements. Still in its pilot stage, 20 sites are live now and 30 more will be online by the end of the month—all are based in the south-west of England and focus on communities of between 10,000 and 50,000 people. "

"Associated Northcliffe Digital has begun a pilot scheme into ultra-local online media with the launch of 23 community websites in the south-west of England."

"How can and should news organizations and others add value to the new news ecosystem that is being used in the Iran story?"

"Welcome to the Future of Journalism on Open Salon."

"Mobile advertising revenues in the US and Canada will grow from $208 million in 2009 to $1.5 billion by 2013, despite possible early consumer resistance to mobile ads, according to new research from Parks Associates."

"On the open web, services get built on top of services… As we move up the aggregation stack, we start to assemble larger audiences… The new media is a disaggregated medium, where the channels themselves may be small but the microchunks that flow out of them can be very large."

"What really distinguishes mobile is immediacy and location. You want news and info you can use immediately to make a decision—to reroute your trip home because of a traffic jam, to find out about a fast-breaking story or sports score, or to search and find a restaurant, an entertainment venue or a local business."

"MediaShift’s Mark Glaser has some different suggestions for newspapers."

"Craigslist, the “free classifieds” site that offers community advertising in 570 markets worldwide but charges only for a tiny percentage of its ads, will generate $100 million in revenue in 2009, the AIM Group / Classified Intelligence estimated today. That’s an increase of more than 23 percent from Craigslist’s estimated revenue of $81 million in 2008"

"The consensus as of late seems to be that while ad sales have been down, they are stabilizing. Benchmark Capital analyst Clayton Moran says not so fast."

"In essence, Sinha expects Q3 to remain slow, with the possibility for growth returning for the Q4 holiday season."

"People often state that one advantage an online newspaper has over the printed edition is unlimited space. Whilst this may be true about the number of individual articles we publish, it isn't true about our online navigation."

"Web developer Antone Roundy posted an intriguing YouTube video on his blog last week about how he's using the free Google Trends service to create online news content that draws massive traffic to his Net Pulse News project."

"It soon will be – if it not already is – known as the Twitter revolution in Iran. But I’ll think of it as the API revolution. For it’s Twitter’s architecture – which enables anyone to create applications that call and feed into it – that makes it all but impervious from blocking by tyrants’ censors."

"Reaction on Twitter and blogs was fast and furious, quite literally, in some instances to the proposals coming out of the Digital Britain report. "

"You can’t please all of the people all of the time – sure enough, Lord Carter’s Digital Britain report is drawing a mixed response, if one slightly warmer than met the January interim version…"

"Communication minister Lord Carter’s final Digital Britain report wants to fund nationwide low-speed broadband and new multimedia news consortia from the BBC’s digital switchover funds, and truly high-speed networks from a levy on old phone lines."

"head over to Boing Boing Gadgets, and read the meme that started earlier this week about the future of a very specific brand, Wired magazine, how it has capitalized on the brand online over the years, and the future for the print and online versions going ahead."

Videos from Google Zeitgeist Europe 2009.

"Yahoo! Placemaker is a freely available geoparsing Web service. It helps developers make their applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content – feeds, web pages, news, status updates – and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup."

"Placemaker is an API that enables developers to pass unstructured data in documents to the service. It extracts the location information in those documents and allows the information to be associated with one or more locations (publishers/developers need to decide which places are most important)."

"Why does Google even need a chief economist? The simplest reason is that the company is an economy unto itself. The ad auction, marinated in that special sauce, is a seething laboratory of fiduciary forensics, with customers ranging from giant multinationals to dorm-room entrepreneurs, all billed by the world's largest micropayment system."

"What it boils down to is this: you can alter the web address of a Google spreadsheet to filter the data and find the story."

"While the e-mail market reaps $12.1 billion, only $848 million of that is local. However, the local media research outfit predicts big growth for local e-mail spending. By 2013, Borrell expects local e-mail revenues will exceed $2 billion, increasing 150 percent. "

"At this unthinkably late hour, many of even the most recalcitrant journalists and newsy curmudgeons have given themselves over, painfully, to the fundamentally important fact that the economics of abundance now govern their world."

"For my first talk, I thought I would address the subject of the future of journalism, not because I can tell you what it is but because, a bit like the feature in the front of Heat magazine, it is the thing which ‘everybody is talking about’."

"Seamus McCauley, strategic analyst at Associated Northcliffe Digital, told an audience at City University that the company is developing a series of hyperlocal websites that 'combine social networking with news'. The first 30 sites will go live next month."

"Mr. Denton told us earlier in the year that sales were actually up double digits, and it appeared marketers' reactions to the recession were "more strategic" than he thought. Sales in the first quarter were up 27% from last year and the second quarter is looking stronger, he said"

"While some might hold out hope that the economy could stabilize in the second half of the year, Cowen & Co. have lowered their revenue forecast for U.S. online ads to a 6 percent decline in 2009 to $22 billion"

"They can and should report – but the link economy demands that they specialize, that they stand out above the level playing field by reporting uniquely"

"Consortium Has Sold Nearly $50 Million So Far"

US: "In a report today, Cowen & Co. analyst Jim Friedland says he now expects online advertising sales to fall six percent in the United States this year, down from a previous estimate of negative three percent."

"I had an interesting email discussion yesterday with a friend. He suggested to me that media doesn't need to be in the cloud to create a great social media service. He said that the files can be stored locally and only the data needs to be in the cloud. I'm not so sure about that."

"A former Ofcom board member has called on Digital Britain author Lord Carter to create a citizen media ecosystem instead of the rumoured public-funded counterpart to the BBC. Ian Hargreaves said during his Unesco World Press Freedom Day lecture Friday night : 'What you need is not a second BBC but investment in networked journalism'."

Trinity Mirror shortlisted for the Best Consumer Website, Mobile Site and Commercial Partnership awards.

"Last year $12.6 billion was spent by local advertisers online, says Borrell Associates in its latest report on local web revenues."

"The slowdown in local online ad spending is having a unexpected effect: newspapers stopped the downward spiral in local ad revenue of the past four years, according to a report by local media analyst Borrell Associates"

"With the four largest Web advertising companies (Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and AOL) having reported March quarter financials, we can get a pretty good sense of how the sector did as a whole. If you add up the online advertising revenues of these four online advertising bellwethers, the total online advertising revenues for the quarter came to $7.9 billion, a 2 percent decline from a year ago and a 7 percent decline from the fourth quarter."

US: "The number of people visiting newspaper Web sites hit a new high in Q1 with an average of 73.3 million unique users, a 10.5% jump compared to the same period a year ago."

"Would the newspapers save a lot of money by literally stopping the presses, and distributing their content digitally to these readers?"

"The iPod stemmed losses in the music industry. The Kindle gave beleaguered book publishers a reason for optimism. Now the recession-ravaged newspaper and magazine industries are hoping for their own knight in shining digital armor, in the form of portable reading devices with big screens."

"A new report from Forrester Research shows behavioural is growing fast in western Europe: just 10 percent of European companies Forrester surveyed in 2007 said they used targeting but that number grew to 26 percent in 2008, when the report says behavioural “finally took off” after years of reluctance from advertisers – 58 percent of advertisers surveyed say they are now interested in using behavioural ads in 2009."

"Display advertising: Can it be both a branding and a performance marketing tool? I'd argue yes, but not at the same time. And that's where some of the recent debates over the art-and-science approach to display have gotten it wrong. "

"new research from ad-targeting and optimization firm Lotame finds that bigger banners don’t necessarily increase engagement. In fact, the study found that medium-sized “rectangle” units hold visitors’ attention far longer their longer, wider counterparts."

"A number of publishers participating in the OPA test have been looking at the display-unit proposals for a few months now."

"Consumers trust advertising on local newspaper, magazine and television websites, and are very likely to take action after viewing ads on these sites, according to the “Local Online Media: From Advertising to Action ” study by the Online Publishers Association (OPA)." (Aug 08)

"With its news syndication business under direct attack by the growing abundance of other news sources on the Internet, the Associated Press announced today that it will begin to police the Web and 'develop a system to track content distributed online to determine if it is being legally used'."

"Wilson cited the Kogi Korean BBQ taco truck as example of the successful use of earned media—they created a community through Twitter and their blog—and now have customers lining up for an hour outside nightclubs."

"Here's the final version of the presentation."

"At McClatchy, 15% of our advertising revenue today comes from online."

"starting today, YouTube is beginning to roll out its AdSense For Video ads on claimed content. AdSense for Video ads are contextually targeted to the title, text, and tags on the video, or they can be targeted more broadly by genre."

"Tonight at Campfire One we released a new set of features — based on community and internal feedback — that helps App Engine interface more easily with businesses' existing technologies"

"the phone industry has had a micropayment system for decades. Ever since the local telephone company charged a customer an extra 35 cents to hear a recorded weather forecast, the phone industry has been charging for content."

"When Ebay released fourth-quarter results in January, its chief blogger, Richard Brewer-Hay, listened in on the earnings call and posted live updates to the micro-blogging site Twitter."

"We are sorry to announce the closure of Press Gazette magazine."

"After lengthy discussions during its board meeting in San Diego this weekend, the Associated Press plans to launch what it calls 'a news newspaper industry initiative to protect news content from misappropriation'."

"IPA president Moray McLennan is confident enough to declare that 'the bottom of the market has been reached'"

"The rate of budget-cutting among UK advertisers slowed in the first quarter, suggesting a modest revival in confidence. The Institute of Practitioners in Advertising’s quarterly bellwether report, released on Monday, said that 45 per cent of the 300 companies surveyed had cut their marketing budgets for the current year in the last three months, compared with 49 per cent in the fourth quarter of 2008. Eleven per cent have increased their planned spending this year, also an improvement on 7 per cent in the previous quarter."

"How else are you going to share links on Twitter without having the URL take up half the message? It may be more complicated than that, however. Joshua Schachter, the founder of Delicious, thinks they are downright evil. Schachter writes, 'The worst problem is that shortening services add another layer of indirection to an already creaky system'."

"We like to make search as easy as we can, so we've just finished the worldwide rollout of local search results on a map, which will now appear even when you don't type in a location. When you search on Google, we will guess where you are and show results near you."

"A.P. to Take On Web Aggregators: In a statement, The A.P. said it would develop a system to track news articles online and determine whether they were being used legally."

"Friendfeed has a new version of its site up today at beta.friendfeed.com, and the early reviews in the tech press are mostly positive."

"you can’t help but wonder how long it will be before Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed all start to look pretty much identical as the services simply copy the best features from their competitors. One thing is for sure, though: FriendFeed moves the fastest. They were the first to add comments to status updates, the first to bring in third party feeds and the first to realize the value of search."

New look FriendFeed

"Brits are happy to watch advertising on the internet or their mobile phones if this means they will get videos, music or other content for free, a survey has found. About 60 per cent of people polled by KPMG, the professional services group, said they would rather watch advertising on the internet in return for free content, rather than pay for it. Only 16 per cent of consumers said they would rather pay for content and avoid ads."

"Here’s a good clue as to why Google should be interested in Twitter. It’s not just search. It’s currency."

"It has been said that if you put a million monkeys in front of a million computers, you would eventually produce an accurate economic forecast. Let's see how well that theory works…"

"URL shortening services are experiencing a renaissance in the age of Twitter. When every character counts, these services reduce long URLs to tiny forms. But which is the best to use, when so many are offered and new ones seem to appear each day?"

"There are a wide variety of web applications, Twitter accounts, and even iPhone apps that can help people do everything from track popular hashtags to graph out recent Twitter trends."

"Google is distribution. It is the newsstand. If Rupert or any other newspaper owner chooses to take its content out of the Google index, there will be plenty of content left that can take its place."

"Would you want to see which stories we are publishing, in chronological order, as soon as they are published, but without any prioritisation of the most urgent or important?"

"With all the resources of the Internet at their fingertips, editors should be able to use their expertise on a subject or geography to sift through multiple sources of news and information and use links and other tools to assemble a comprehensive, edited collection of information for their readers."

"There is a trend evolving at media companies both big and small that promises to have a remarkably positive impact on what you read, watch, and share on the web: Curation."

"Ever notice how the most interesting articles online seem to command too much of your time? Have you ever stopped reading a long article online because you saw that it was paginated into 8 clicks?"

"I did a workshop about Twitter yesterday for some of the journalists I work with at the Globe and Mail, and uploaded it to our internal wiki — and then I figured I might as well upload it to Slideshare so others could see it as well."

"Rupert Murdoch, whose media company News Corp owns one of the few U.S. newspapers that makes people pay to read its news on the Web, said more papers will have to start doing the same to survive."

"In a letter to the Department of Culture, Media and Sport last month Guardian Media Group urged the Government to examine the role of news aggregators."

"I'd like to welcome the Seattle Post-Intelligencer to the world of pureplay, online-only local Internet sites. They have a heckuva a jumpstart with their level of web traffic which any local site would be thrilled to have. Unfortunately, there are many other items that they must put in place to succeed. To their credit, they have taken some good first steps."

"Today we relaunched the BBC Mobile homepage. Devices that store cookies will get a homepage with the customisation options that we have been beta trialling for the last month, and devices that don't store cookies will get a redesigned non-customisable version."

"DiggBar, the new shortURL and toolbar service from Digg, is certainly useful. I expect it to become my default short URL service on Twitter since it is so easy to create a short URL by simply adding Digg.com/ in front of any URL"

"Last month we wrote about the new Digg toolbar product called DiggBar. It launched today. If you want to try it out immediately, just add “digg.com/” before any URL at all (the image above is using the techcrunch domain)."

"Starting today, we’ll begin rolling out a new product we are calling the DiggBar."

"if you want to attract an audience in the competitive online information market, I think you need to choose some values to believe in, and to express them, defend them, and practice them before your audience. Readers, now that they have more choices, want to know whose side you are on."

"In an age when competition and pricing are opened up online and when your product is your ad, you need to spend your first dollar on the quality of your product or service."

"I spent some time this morning putting together the first draft of my talk on Tuesday at the Ad Age Digital conference. It builds on what I laid out in my post yesterday under the same title."

"Earned media is media you don't buy but earn the hard way. PR is an example of earned media. Word of mouth is another. Earned media has been around forever. But it has now gotten a lot easier, thanks to the Internet and social media, to earn media for your brand, product, or self."

"Internet advertising continues to buck wider advertising industry trends, with spend rising 17% to £3.3bn in 2008."

"The internet now accounts for nearly one-fifth of all marketing spend in the UK, and was the only marketing medium to grow during 2008, according to new research."

"Trinity Mirror has launched an online business directory called LocalMole.co.uk that is designed to connect local users with local businesses."

"This week, it’s quietly unveiling a new local business directory search site, LocalMole.co.uk"

Local Mole Business Directory

"Today brought yet another forecast for ther 2009 display advertising. Since it’s hard to keep all the various ad forecasts straight—particularly with the frequent revisions—here’s a quick rundown of some from the past three months from prominent internet ad revenue prognosticators"

"Last year we announced the launch of local news in the U.S., and this week we launched this feature of Google News to users in the UK, India, and Canada."

"The UK Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB UK), based on polling data from Lightspeed Research, has released information on how the content of digital advertisements affects viewer interest—as well as on the effectiveness of different online ad formats. "

"Research conducted exclusively for Marketing by Nielsen shows that some of the UK's top telecoms, technology and gambling brands increased their investment in online advertising in 2008. However, finance brands, which previously dominated the medium, severely curtailed their budgets in response to the global financial crisis."

"Microsoft last week lost European browser market leadership for the first time in years, when Mozilla's Firefox 3 took the top spot from Internet Explorer 7, Web analytics firm StatCounter said on Tuesday." [via @gregsterling]

"The Knot is launching 75 new localized sites in the hopes of reaching brides-to-be from Tampa to Tucson."

"The results from the seventh annual AOP Census survey released today reveals that UK online publishers predict a 16% growth in their digital revenues in 2009 "

US: "According to data released yesterday by the IAB/PwC on Q4 and full year 2008 online advertising revenues, performance-based advertising and search gained while other segments declined slightly or were flat. Overall, online advertising grew 10.6% in 2008 to reach $23.4 billion."

US: "Internet advertising revenues in the US remain strong, with Q408 revenues hitting $6.1 billion, and revenues for the year topping $23 billion, according to the 2008 Internet Advertising Revenue Report from the Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP (PwC). "

"The long awaited Google venture capital fund, Google Ventures, is now open for business. The Fund is led by managing partners Bill Maris and Rich Miner."

"Up to 71% of consumers in the US and 41% in parts of Western Europe anticipate that they will use the mobile internet and other mobile data services on a daily basis over the next two years – with a significant ramp-up in the next 12 months, according to a survey from Tellabs."

"As promised by no less a personage than Om Malik himself, the official Skype iPhone client has arrived. Although video streaming is a no-show, both full IM and voice communication is supported directly over wireless networks."

"Today I would like to share my thoughts on various mobile phone user interfaces." [via @mattcutts]

"Just over a year after launching his Wikia Search engine, Wikipedia Founder Jimmy Wales is closing it down, citing the economy. Wikia Search attempted to duplicate Wikipedia’s success by allowing users to edit and suggest search results for different queries."

"It’s been three years since I started this blog. The first (on topic) post was back in 2006 and it was a short post blogging Katie Couric’s move to NBC which prompted Newsweek to ponder if “the real action in TV news may be happening on the Web”"